Road trip...

Mark flew to Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon, so I was home alone until Wednesday night. We have been wanting to go visit Hannah at college for a little while now, and I decided Monday was the perfect day. Flossie decided to join me. It was a 3 hour trip and Flossie and I met up halfway and rode together. Once we got to Buena Vista, we crammed Hannah into our already full car and headed to a park for lunch. The kids were so excited to be with each other and to run so they had lots of fun. Flossie, Hannah and I sat around and gossiped--oh how I love my sisters!

Carson and Katie

Cooper and Addy
(please don't pay attention to her hair, I had it fixed all pretty but the 3-hr car trip gave Addy enough time to rip out her hair clips and matte it up)

After the park we went to Goodwill which surprisingly had some good finds--it brought back a lot of memories of shopping in high school. The kids ran around like hooligans, but luckily no one seemed to mind, we lost Cooper a couple times because we kept forgetting how fast he is. When the store had enough of us we went back to Hannah's to check out her apartment (I think her roommate got a little scared when she saw the five kids). The we headed to her campus for some ice cream (that adventure also included jumping in the piles of leaves that were being raked up and feeding/trying to get the gold fish in the pond).

The car!

Some of our craziness...

This whole summer has been a whirlwind of trying to do everything we wanted before Mark started his new job...the last 4 weeks have been no exception (and that has led to me being a total slacker with the whole blog thing).

At the beginning of the month I had some friends over that had adopted through us; actually, we became friends when they adopted through us. Both families adopted from the same birthmother, so they were excited to get together. (Both have very crazy stories, and if I ever do an adoption blog I will write about them--I'll ask first, Richele.)

We had 2 preschoolers, 5 toddlers and one baby in the house--it got a little crazy, but oh so much fun.

Jess, Katie, Cambriah, Jasper, Brandon, Addy, Fletcher and Marcus
Marcus and Fletcher became fast friends and were so funny to watch together.

My kids are all still obsessed with babies

Katie has been doing great at soccer. Her last game she was a superstar. She isn't afraid to kick the ball anymore and she has some serious ball handling skills for a 4-yr-old.

Marcus is ready to play, he keeps trying to get on the field

I flew to Washington State last week to have my wisdom teeth removed (Mark's cousin did it for us since we currently don't have dental insurance.) Kris and Liz (Mark's aunt and cousin) picked me up and we spent the day in Seattle. After some site-seeing we met Emily for dinner (wouldn't be nice if I had taken a picture of us at dinner with Emily).

the 'fish market'
The next day I had my teeth removed, and the rest of the trip I was 'couped' up in Aunt Kris' house on the sound, watching TV in their theater room and getting room-service of ice-cream shakes. (thank you Kris and Phil for taking care of me!)

Sunrise on the beach in front of their house

Mark survived surprisingly well without me, and the house was clean when I got home!
We spent the last week just hanging out.

Mark used his smoker one last time... (doesn't it sound like he is going off to war or something.)
Of course he had to make this delicious food while I was still recovering so I didn't really get to enjoy it, but Mark ate enough for the both of us.

Mark also grabbed some pumpkins for us to carve. The kids were pretty excited about them.